- The perils of dematerialization play out in India.
- Is YamHub dematerialization?
- Rice genebanks in Bangladesh and at IRRI are pretty solid.
- There’s a pretty solid platform for India’s community seed banks.
- I hope Nagaland’s wild bananas end up in genebanks.
- Cassava’s diversity is in multiple genebanks, and that’s a good thing, CBSD and all.
- ICARDA’s genebank back in the Syrian news, though in a good way for once.
- Tajikistan’s women farmers are bringing back crops with not a worry about dematerialization. Or genebanks, it seems.
Nibbles: Ancient Mexican seedbank, Indian millets, Foraged foods, Soybean breeding, Apple breeding, Albanian heirlooms, Bangladesh fish genebank
- People in the Nejapan Sierra Sur in Oaxaca, Mexico had a seed bank 400-700 years ago so they could re-create their complex cuisine after disruptions.
- How MSSRF revived millets in Odisha, India. You think a seed bank was involved?
- Meanwhile, in Meghalaya (also India), foraged foods are helping to diversify state-provided school lunches and address chronic malnutrition. Talk about complex cuisine. Are all these species in a seed bank somewhere, though? Do they need to be?
- How the National Soybean Germplasm Collection at the Agricultural Research Service lab in Urbana, Illinois helped save soybeans in Iowa.
- University breeding programmes are keeping the apple afloat in the USA. That and genebanks.
- Farmers and agrotourism are bringing back some cool flavors in Albania. Well, that and the Albanian Gene Bank.
- Fish need genebanks too, and Bangladesh is on it. Did ancient Bangladeshis have them, I wonder?
Nibbles: Nourishing investments, Genebank RoI, Seed science double, Ecuador genebank, Ethiopian genebank, MSSRF genebank, CG genebanks, Botanic gardens, SwissAid saves seeds, Brazil conservation, Indian diner, Kenyan food, Saladino on citrus, Lost apple, Seed Savers, Hybrids, Germplasm crime
- All of IFAD’s 5 investments that will help nourish the world need crop diversity. Prove me wrong.
- And yet we still have to have articles on communicating the importance of genebanks.
- Cosmos tries to do it by pointing to the science.
- Smithsonian Magazine tries to do it by saying it’s tricky.
- Genebanks try to do it by having nice new websites and talking to the media. Some of the biggest media.
- CGIAR tries to do it by calling them an Accelerator.
- IIED tries to do it by saying even botanic gardens can help farmers.
- SwissAid thinks “[n]ational and international gene banks should give farmers’ organizations low-threshold access to their collections.” No argument there.
- Maybe we should have songs about genebanks, like the Maxakali have about the Atlantic Forest.
- Or we could just talk about food, food, glorious food.
- Could also just fall back on the good old canonical lost-heirloom-apple-found story.
- Or the canonical medical case for “ancient grains” story.
- Though even there the heirlooms vs hybrids debate will rage I suppose…
- But, whatever we do, let’s not take it to extremes, shall we?
Brainfood: Maroon rice, Dutch aroids, Sicilian saffron, Inca agriculture, Native American agriculture, Mexican peppers, Afro-Mexican agriculture, Sahelian landraces, Small-scale fisheries, Coconut remote sensing
- The Mystery of Black Rice: Food, Medicinal, and Spiritual Uses of Oryza glaberrima by Maroon Communities in Suriname and French Guiana. There’s a rich oral history of African rice in Maroon communities, but that doesn’t mean either the traditional knowledge or diversity of the crop is safe.
- The Invisible Tropical Tuber Crop: Edible Aroids (Araceae) Sold as “Tajer” in the Netherlands. Another example of traditional knowledge on crops surviving far from their home.
- Rethinking Pliny’s “Sicilian Crocus”: Ecophysiology, Environment, and Classical Texts. There might have been two distinct saffron species in ancient Sicily. Another way of recovering traditional knowledge is by reading ancient texts.
- Trees, terraces and llamas: Resilient watershed management and sustainable agriculture the Inca way. The sedimentary record can be used to recover traditional knowledge too. No word on what ancient text have to say, but I’m sure it’s something.
- Yield, growth, and labor demands of growing maize, beans, and squash in monoculture versus the Three Sisters. Sometimes traditional knowledge can use a helping hand from scientists. And vice versa.
- Interdisciplinary insights into the cultural and chronological context of chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.) domestication in Mexico. About the only thing that’s missing here is traditional knowledge.
- Afro-Indigenous harvests: Cultivating participatory agroecologies in Guerrero, Mexico.
Makes one wish these authors had been involved in the pepper study above. - Tradeoffs between the use of improved varieties and agrobiodiversity conservation in the Sahel. The effect of improved varieties on local landraces (and presumably associated traditional knowledge) is different for pearl millet and groundnut, and for Mali and Niger.
- Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries. I’m sure lots of traditional knowledge is involved.
- Satellite imagery reveals widespread coconut plantations on Pacific atolls. They could have just asked the small-scale fisherfolk, but ok.
Brainfood: Beverage edition
- Crop-to-wild gene flow in wild coffee species: the case of Coffea canephora in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. DNA bits diagnostic of domesticated coffee are finding their way into wild rainforest populations, but not all that much.
- The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica reveal the diversification history of modern coffee cultivars. Diversity was already pretty low in pre-domestication wild arabica, and continued going downhill after that. Time to re-synthesize the crop, I say.
- Beyond the Orthodoxy: An Overview of the Potential of ‘Other’ Coffee Species for Crop Use and their Associated Challenges. All well and good, but don’t forget there’s more to coffee than just arabica and robusta.
- Advancing Coffee Genetic Resource Conservation and Exchange: Global Perspectives and Strategies from the ICC 2024 Satellite Workshop. Time to properly secure all coffee diversity in genebanks, and that includes sorting out ABS.
- Expanding the cacao group: three new species of Theobroma sect. Herrania (Malvaceae: Byttnerioideae) from the Western Amazon Basin. Plenty of “other” cacao species too, and more coming.
- Seed morphometrics unravels the evolutionary history of grapevine in France. There was wild-domesticate geneflow in early grapevines in France as well as in robusta coffee in the DRC, and you don’t need to trace bits of DNA to prove it.
- Characterization and analysis of a Commiphora species germinated from an ancient seed suggests a possible connection to a species mentioned in the Bible. Thousand-year-old seed is a distinct and possibly long-lost species of myrrh. Which ok is not a beverage but still vaguely liquid, at least initially.
- Sesame, an Underutilized Oil Seed Crop: Breeding Achievements and Future Challenges. Ok, since we’re doing liquid-producing crops, let’s include this review of sesame improvement. Lots of wild species to use. No word on wild-domesticate geneflow though.